Thanksgiving

The past week, with the clock ticking until I leave Oxford possibly for good, I've gotten myself out and about a bit more. I love biking over to Keble around 12:30, scoffing at the freshers queuing for crappy fatty food at the dining hall, and dodging through the narrow paths around the pub to pick up a chicken sub and one or usually two Cokes to take home from the cafe. I figure UGA is probably earning money from all the crappy dining hall food I paid for but have never cashed in on, so I'll go to the "prohibitively expensive" cafe every day until I leave. :P I also have gotten back out to the grocery store to indulge my good and bad habits for buying too much delicious-looking food on an empty stomach. Mid-morning is a good time, time to get crumpets or welsh cakes (these delicious scone-shaped but flatter and moister cakes with black currants and nutmeg) before they sell out but also to get through the U-Scan lines before all the children have their lunch break and pour into M&S to run around and scream or mope in their school uniforms. My particular vice in Oxford has been juice--they make so many great ones here, like tangerine juice (the grown-up's orange juice), and generally they don't add sugar or water to it so it's nice and fresh and full of vitamins. Dr. Eberle had to stage an intervention, though, because when she was reorganizing the refrigerator to make room for Thanksgiving supplies she noticed six half-full cartons juice with my name scrawled on them. My name is Lauren Elmore, and I have a drinking problem. Mainly fruit juice.

A more community-friendly result of my market-prowling was my world-famous carrot cake! (World-famous because I've told friends in France and now England about how fabulous it is.) Dad had scanned Mom's recipe into an e-mail for me near the beginning of term, but I had waffled about actually baking one for so long because, baffled by degrees Celsius and measurements in grams, I was worried I'd bake something horribly burned or salty or something and no one would believe my stories about life-changing pastry. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I got into the kitchen Tuesday night and peeled and shredded and blended and sifted to my (and Julianna's) heart's content, watching the cakes in the 180 degree oven like a hawk until I had to run to dinner and fretting like a mother away from her children all through another of Keble's culinary catastrophes (they actually figured out how to mess up potatoes). Once I got home, I had a small army waiting for me to frost the cakes in the clammy, cinnamony kitchen, and I think their anticipation paid off. The cakes looked and tasted just like normal, the only flaw being slightly runny frosting ("icing sugar" is a little different than powdered sugar, I think), but even then its sliding out from between the two layers gave the sides a pretty, drizzled look. I bought way too many carrots, though, having no conception of how many carrots make three cups of shredded carrots, so I'm making carrot cake 2.0 in the next day or so, as well as a salad with 12 more carrots chopped on top.

Wednesday evening we had our dons party, or, as I'd like to think of it, a university-sponsored indulgence in alcohol with our tutors cautioned to attend. :P No, funny as it was for our student fees to be applied to 48 bottles of wine, the affair was very classy and a very fun group of most of the students and their tutors broke the "no liquids in the library" rule as politely as possible. I spent the first hour of the party in the kitchen, shifting 10 batches of pre-made hors d'oeuvres in and out of the oven and onto platters--no one else had immediately stepped in to manage the kitchen, and I had the double motivation of having a foodie family background and of feeling at first a bit awkward to get out and mingle with other people's nicely dressed tutors. Eventually (after several "vols au vent" and Belgian truffles) I made my way into the stuffy library and found things pretty fun. Carly picked up a gin and tonic for me, from resident bartenders Will and Tony, and I enjoyed chatting with Mrs. Bradshaw and her husband (Dr. Bradshaw of UGA at Oxford fame--it's good that he knows of me by reputation as a good maker of carrot cake, because I'd be too nervous to say anything smart to probably the world's premier Virginia Woolf scholar). As the night wore on, several of us raided the mini-fridge--me characteristically stealing a box of orange juice and drinking it without a glass--and lounged in the armchairs thrown around the library to chat and scare passing children (OK, not everyone on that last one--Matt Williamson scared Leila from across the garden when he walked by the window with a Venetian mask on, but all was well when she saw that it was just the guy who yells at the football games). :P

Continued, 25 November 10:15 p.m.-- I woke up on Thursday morning feeling like I do every Thanksgiving--I just wanted to shlepp around in my PJs, watch football, eat lots of food, and pass out. Thankfully, we had all planned ahead to do just that. Several of the guys had hooked up a computer to the television to watch NFL games all day, so the small furor of boys crunching potato chips and occasionally screaming at the television comforted/distracted me while I finished up a history essay/gabbed at my friends in the library down the hall. By about 6 good smells were wafting out of the kitchen, and by 6:10 everyone who wasn't cooking was banned from the kitchen until dinner, so we all clustered around the ground floor, most of us in festive-colored sweaters, to collectively grumble about being hangry and three (THREE!) false alarms about it being dinnertime. Eventually we made a line about as big as any Elmore Thanksgiving line that wrapped around the kitchen island and its plate upon plate of mostly homemade food. Dr. Eberle made some great herbed stuffing (she was worried about having added tablespoons instead of teaspoons of herbs, since we don't have measuring spoons and just use actual coffee and soup spoons for baking, but I thought it tasted great!), Gabriel made scalloped potatoes with gruyere and creme fraiche that I seriously ran back for seconds of, and some of the second floor kids made four adorably homemade pies that were surprisingly tasty. Weird as it would seem, it was pretty much like a family Thanksgiving as we all sat down around the dining room table. Some people got nostalgic as the night wore on, and even though I entertained the group by telling the one family Thanksgiving tradition I could think of (my mom "dancing" with the turkey as she cleans it in the sink--seriously, I thought everyone did this) I never felt sad to be away from home on Thanksgiving. My family was still there, and I called them the day before and a few days later for their bigger family gathering during the UGA-GT game, and how could I be sad to be in Oxford?

In hospital

Sunday morning I made the horrible mistake of reading WebMD. Extreme sore throat? I had that! Flu-like symptoms and fatigue? I had that too! Stabbing pains in upper abdomen, right under the ribs? Oh my god, that's my spleen, and it's about to explode because I must have mononucleosis. I called the emergency hotline to pick a doctor's brain about it and see if I could put off going to the GP until Monday, and he seemed a bit miffed that I didn't have any violent vomiting or diarrhea, so it was hard to get a good answer from him. I napped for two hours in the middle of the day (making myself buy into the "fatigue" symptom a bit more when I'm sure I just hadn't slept enough the night before), and by the time I was walking to dinner the horrible pain in my chest kept going even when I wasn't stretching, and it felt like a knife was heaving up and down between my ribs with every step. I got a Coke with Carly, Sarah, and Zach before dinner and cracked a few jokes about my spleen being a time-bomb over a really horrible stuffed eggplant, but on the walk home I had pretty much decided I was going to call a taxi to the hospital.

I've always liked to be discreet and handle my problems on my own whenever possible, but that "appalled" Mary Catherine, Julianna and Dr. Eberle as they all eventually discovered me looking pretty pained in the kitchen and called Mrs. Bradshaw to drive me to the hospital. As the wait in the E.R. wore on to about four hours, I was really glad I had someone nice enough to wait with me that long--I didn't know the British healthcare system, so it was good to have Mrs. Bradshaw there to tell me what kind of things they find important (bowel movements, apparently, which was pretty embarrassing to talk about even though the doctors brought it up like small talk, and also that I need to pipe up for painkillers because they won't give you any if you don't ask). In a very weird situation, we also had a pretty good time just chatting. I pointed out a few good French films I'd seen in Cannes as she looked over a brochure for a French film series near Oxford, and she told me about her really fun-sounding five-person yoga class in a cottage near the Cotswolds as I employed some deep-breathing to get through the E.R. doc's taking a big vial of blood from the back of my elbow (can that be called an elbowpit? I'd like that). Around 2, once they had shunted me over to a gurney in the "Clinical Decisions Unit" (essentially the "sit here while we figure out what's wrong with you" unit), I tried to act brave and let Mrs. Bradshaw go home to get some sleep. She had been so nice to sit with me all that time (six hours!), and I felt like, having tried to just take a cab to the hospital on my own, I could probably handle the night by myself until they diagnosed me. Things got a little hairy when a surgical consult came by--he didn't have the best bedside manner, so I didn't trust him when he said it didn't seem like a serious medical issue, and when he poked the area between my ribs that hurt the most I burst into tears with the pain--but miraculously Dr. Eberle showed up to chase nurses and insist upon my being admitted since I still wanted to know what was wrong with me.

In the morning I finally got some painkillers and water (but no food!) and they moved me to the only empty bed in the surgical emergency ward, in the "resuscitation room"/supply closet, to await an ultrasound. I got maybe an hour and a half of sleep the night before, so I was glad to doze off in a real, fluffy bed until 11:30 when Julianna showed up with my pillow and iPod. She did an excellent job looking out for me, too, running off to ask the nurses "Well, WHEN is she going to see the senior doctor?" We both had a good laugh when the ultrascan doctor, like all the other doctors, really, told me she was "going to take a look at my tummy," like "tummy" was the most appropriate medical term. Eventually they decided that I have an inflamed muscle across my ribcage from the infection I'd had over the previous few weeks and from all of the violent coughing and that the best thing for me to do was to get a big pack of codeine (or, my favorite, co-codemol, a blend of codeine and paracetamol that sounds like Coco Puffs!) and just watch TV/read books/not move. So that's what I've done the past few days.

The whole British hospital experience was pretty funny. The NHS is good and bad, just like any healthcare system I guess. It was too rad to not pay a pence for my overnight "in hospital" (it's like an adjective, not a prepositional phrase, for invalids in England--I almost laughed when one of my nurses asked if my parents knew I was in hospital). I had asked several of my doctors over the night whether it was a problem that I wasn't a UK taxpayer, but they all said not to worry about it because it was most important that I got care when I was sick. But, for all the time it takes in ERs in the States, I'm pretty sure I would have had that emergency ultrasound within an hour, instead of after a long, sleepless night where I could have been waiting for my spleen to explode. We also saw a woman with the tip of her finger nearly severed from slamming a door on it wait to see a doctor for an hour longer than a girl with a headache! Mrs. Bradshaw chuckled a bit about it not being the rosy picture that Michael Moore would paint, but all in all I feel like I eventually got all the attention I needed, and definitely a lot more than I paid for (7 pounds for my codeine, which is the flat rate for any prescription). I'm not sure universal healthcare would work in the States (we ain't socialists!), but I'm sure there's a lot we have to learn.

My life in Oxford had been slowing down a lot anyway, but with the "inflamed muscle" I've retreated from the outside world even more. I feel like an old woman, calculating which is the shortest route to get wherever I want to go or whether I even need to go out at all because of how painful it could be, which makes me so much more grateful for how healthy I am 99.9% of the time. As I've emerged sporadically the past two days to get to classes and Keble dinner, I've walked myself around (instead of biking, much to my chagrin since it takes so much longer and really doesn't feel much less painful to walk) listening to my iPod like I'm some moody emo-kid in an indie film with my own soundtrack, and I think I've started to mourn. I walk to obscure libraries or down certain alleys and wonder if it's the last time I'll walk there, because I'm not sure when (if ever) I'll return to England again. But bundled up in my peacoat and pashmina, peeking into restaurants and pubs and cafes where I've had fun with my friends, I feel like I have so many good memories to last me a long time.

My life as an invalid

A few days after my return from the Lake District what had been a cold on it's way out became some strange strep throat/flu hybrid on it's way in, and I've been out of commission for most of the past week. As most of my congestion has drained away and I've gotten peppier over the past two days, I figure Eleanor could tell Mrs. Dashwood "She's out of danger," but I'm still walking around the house and running into people I feel like I haven't seen for weeks. A few highlights of my Oxford-style immersion in learning how to take care of myself:

Making scrambled eggs with cheese and a peanut butter crumpet works for all meals. I feel good about my protein intake as well as my domestic skills while stuck in the house, and all the coughing makes people avoid my food like the plague--no more theft!

You can get out of any awkward/irritating conversation by feigning (or actually having, I guess) a coughing fit.

If you can't get out and see England, you can take a pretty good tour of the country by watching some carefully selected movies. Some of my picks were Wimbledon, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill, The Holiday, and Arrested Development (oh wait, that was Wee Britain in Los Angeles, not the real thing... could have fooled me :P), as I watched between two and three movies per day.

And my personal favorite tip: Most cold remedies need to be drunk, not eaten. I went to Shakespeare tutorial on Monday in pretty shabby condition, if no longer contagious, and my super-sweet don said "Lauren, I'm worried about you. England doesn't seem to be doing you right in the health department. Take a few of these--and let me know if you suddenly feel like a new woman, because my mum swears she always feels like a new woman when she uses these." The little atomic yellow Tums- or Smarties-looking tablets were called "Hairy Lemons" and come from Australia, where that kind of blend of caffeine, guarana, and strange vitamins I've never heard of before is legal. I got home a little too excited to try one and took a big bite while sitting at my desk. Big mistake. Imagine me biting into an Alka-Seltzer tablet--my mouth filled up instantly with yellow foam, and I was laughing too hard along with my roommate to be able to choke it down quickly. I had fun putting the other half in a glass of water and watching it fizz for two minutes before it had dissolved, thinking about the similar fate of the bitten half bobbing around my stomach.

I felt a bit better and way too cooped up by Wednesday morning, so I got up early, stuffed a big pack of "tissues" (TP stolen from the housekeeping closet) and cough drops in my purse, and took myself to London to see the Millais exhibit at Tate Britain. I studied my underground map while on the Oxford Tube and knew right where to hit the ground running (or, rather, walking officiously) at Victoria Station. One stop up to Pimlico (sounds like a gas station, I think, but is a station in a snazzy riverside part of town) I followed the amusement park-like street signs to Tate Britain, a huge, blackened white stone building that looked like a sculpture itself on the banks of the Thames. The walls were painted with "Millais -->" directives like the ones I smile at at the High in Atlanta (wouldn't it be a fun job to officially vandalize the walls of a museum every time a new exhibit needs some explanations?), and I quickly found the stuffy part of the basement where about 150 of one of the 19th century's most popular artists' works sat to be swarmed by a lot of old people, art students, and me. I have to say that, as much as I usually don't like or "get" art exhibits, I really enjoyed this one. Millais was this crazy child prodigy--they had this photograph-like sketch he did of a Greek sculpture when he was 11!--and his early work with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is precocious and vivid like the Romantic poetry I like best. He could capture women's faces with this incredible sensitivity to emotional shades--"Ophelia", the painting of the Shakespearian heroine that graced the tiles of many a London subway station wall the past few months, has the most haunting expression of a person giving herself up to suicide, and Millais's wife's sister, Sophie, posed for a portrait that made me wish I had that much magnetism, now let alone at age 14. I considered buying a print for my new apartment, but I was too frustrated at their quality--when Mariana's dress on the poster looked just navy, whereas the real 150-year-old painting has her in this warm, jewel-like cerulean that looks just like velvet, I just couldn't bear it. The makings of an art snob...? Probably not, but I'm definitely on a quest now to seek out the PRB works around Oxford, since the Ashmolean has a lot and Keble Chapel itself has the original "Light of the World" by William Holman Hunt. They are just too intriguing not to see in person!

I had been wanting to see Kensington by day, so after my leisurely amble through the six rooms of the Millais exhibit I flew up several blocks and several connecting trains below them to get to the High Street Kensington station as my base of operations for a much less erudite afternoon. It probably would have been cheaper to just go to McDonalds outside the station (even the classy folks need their Big Macs), but I was itching to explore the Whole Foods we had seen on our night tour of Kensington a week or so earlier. They really do have everything like in the States--including shelf upon shelf of Emergen-C sachets near the checkouts for the germaphobic vitamin junkies (me, the past few weeks!), and reusable jute grocery bags that say "Whole Foods-Kensington" that I should have bought to look cheeky at Whole Foods-Alpharetta--and I got a blood orange tonic and a plate of food from the hot lunch line to take to the upstairs cafe and brood by a window. (Again, kidding!) The salad I got to go with my mac and cheese was made of red onions, sugar snap peas, and purple potatoes! Purple like easter eggs! I had to enjoy their color and crisp texture, since I still can't taste anything very well with my sick nose (dead from too many tissues) and tongue (dead from too many numbing cough drops), and I ate slowly while watching nearby tables of some posh high school girls grabbing lunch and Facebooking, a young couple having a muffled fight over fresh fruit smoothies, and two young mothers breastfeeding (?! in public?! I still think it's weird) over the sushi they could finally eat again.

I had time before nightfall (at 4!) to zip into some of the classy, white plastic and metal (iPod-looking!) shops outside the Whole Foods windows. Urban Outfitters was a funny stop, because I realized that all the over-priced, flimsy, boho (hobo?) clothes are actually staples here. That's how the cute, pixie haircut, super skinny and pale British chicks dress. I felt like I wouldn't find anything unique there. I skimmed through Zara, but the crowd there was a bit too rich-looking, bouffant-haired, middle-aged brunette--for all my fast walking and studied nonchalance, I felt too much like a preppy college kid to be smelling perfume and trying on trenchcoats with them. Uniqlo, the Tokyo import next door, totally did the trick. Their clothes are a lot like the Gap, classic and preppy, but they fit better and are a lot cheaper than British Gap! I took a long time trying on a pile of clothes I had to shift in and out of my dressing room to stay under the try-on limit, and I modeled lots of cute mini-skirts, skinny jeans, and floppy sweaters to a great soundtrack of John Mayer, Jet, and other poppy folks that really cheered me up. I left with a great sweatery minidress for only 18 pounds (they had a student discount) and merrily carried a big shopping bag on the Tube like any young woman in London before I hopped the Oxford Tube to get home, have a few coughing fits, make scrambled eggs, and pass out at 8:30.